Campus Reactors

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Matthew Wald on the UW’s “little” nuclear reactor:

The University of Wisconsin’s nuclear reactor is an unassuming little model, operated (on Tuesdays and Thursdays only) by students in T-shirts and shorts. In the last few months it has been used to identify the source of pottery shards from an ancient settlement in India, to test whether heart stents work better if they have been irradiated, and to study the water and gas balance that would be present in a future generation of power reactors.
But its fuel is weapons-grade uranium. If it were stolen, experts say, it could give terrorists or criminals a major head start on an atomic bomb.
And Wisconsin is not alone. Five other university research reactors around the country use weapons-grade fuel, even though the federal government has promised for more than two decades to reclaim their uranium and substitute a less enriched variety that is closer to the kind that commercial power plants use.

Healthcare Pricing Transparency

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Adam Hanft has some useful suggestions that would help all of us evaluate health care costs.

The industry could address this by employing this very notion of pricing transparency. How much of its premium income gets passed through to its members and their doctors and hospitals, versus how much is overhead and profit? Imagine how much better consumers would feel if they understood that HMOs exist to collect premiums from everyone in order to redistribute the money to those who need it. Essentially, it’s a major re-education campaign.
This is a model that the non-profit world has adopted, as scandals such as the United Way mess focused attention on what percent of a contribution finds its way to those who need it. Indeed, these metrics have become part of their messaging strategy.

Digital Audio & The Copyright Gap

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Tim Wu:

Witness the Copyright Gap in its full majesty. In the UK, Digital Radio has been live at the BBC for about three years now. As the BBC says, ?Digital Audio Broadcasting gives you far greater station choice, better reception & clarity of sound with no re-tuning.?
Yet meanwhile, in the country that invented both the radio station and the transistor, digital radio is stuck. Among other problems, the FCC is contending with the RIAA?s arguments that, absent proper controls, digital radio would be ?the perfect storm? for the music industry. Digital radio, the RIAA believes, must be prevented from causing the ?enormous damage wrought by peer-to-peer piracy.? On Monday, the RIAA filed a new letter reiterating that the ?threat? from digital radio is ?real and imminent.?

Community Pools – Minnesota

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Tim Post:

For years the old neighborhood pool was the best place to cool off on hot summer days. But across the region, cities have had to close those old pools because of expensive repairs and declining attendance. In a day of air conditioners and cable TV, pools don’t serve as community gathering places much anymore. But now city leaders are trying to attract a new generation of swimmers and splashers with more exciting pools.